MySpace Open Sources Internal Distributed Computing FrameworkIt looks like the two biggest social networks in the US are getting into an open-source war as, just days after Facebook released the Tornado framework, MySpace is releasing its own piece of open software with the Qizmt framework, designed to handle large amounts of unstructured data, which is now powering the “People You May Know” feature. “Today, we are open-sourcing Qizmt, an internally developed framework for distributed computation created by the Data Mining team here at MySpace. Qizmt can be used for many operations that require processing large amounts of data such as collaborative filtering for recommendations and analytics,” says the announcement that came from Mike Jones, MySpace's chief operating officer himself. “Qizmt is a powerful MapReduce-based environment that enables MySpace user recommendation engines to become smarter, faster and more reliable. [...] Qizmt is unique because it was developed using C#.NET specifically for Windows platforms.” The technology is based on Google's own MapReduce distributed computing framework, which it maintains and uses extensively across several services including its search indexing. What makes Qimzt interesting is the fact that it’s written using Microsoft's .NET framework and is designed to be r...

Google, Yahoo and Bing Shake HandsThere's no secret that web searching today is dominated by Google and that major effort is invested by competition to balance the market share. The global perspective of the usage statistics shows the Mountain View company shattering all rivalry with a smashing percentage of 83% for the month of August. That's a helluva slice of the world's web searches.If you think that web searching cannot be optimized even more than it is now, you're in for a surprise because there is plenty of uncharted territory left to explore and further possibilities have already popped out. Meta-searches have not yet been introduced to the common user, but the idea has been toyed with and even materialized into something somewhat concrete. Fusionsearch is part of the new breed of search engines, meta-search engines.It does not come with its own search algorithm, but instead provides you the power of the three most powerful services on the web: Google, Yahoo! and Bing. To make it even more interesting, add the fact that information also comes from the language-based engine WolframAlpha.Fusionsearch is capable of combining the web results of all aforementioned services as well as their image answers to your query. The looks are simple and clean, with all the options present in the main window. There isn't too much to fiddle with and...

Tr.im Begins to Open-Source the ServiceLast summer URL shortener Tr.im made quite a few waves when it announced that the service would be shut down by the year's end due to lack of any perspective revenue model. The response, both from the press but also from the users, made Nambu Networks, the company that owns Tr.im, reconsider the closure and after a while it announced that it would open source the project. Finally, the process is now underway, with a git repository already set up and live. “You can follow tr.im’s evolution into an open source project at its new home on github as it is handed over from Nambu to Eric Woodward personally, and from there into the hands of the community at large,” the company wrote on the Tr.im blog. “The process is a bit behind schedule. The first two modules for tr.im are available now, but the final tr.im website module is not quite ready. The authentication and login system needs to be updated, and some bug fixes need to be applied as well. It will be released in an additional day or two (or three at the latest).” It all started in early August when the announcement was made that Tr.im, a somewhat popular URL shortening system that enjoyed over 1 million unique visitors every month, would be shutting down and taking all of the links that users shared on the service down with it. Th...